Strengthening democracy through hybrid democratic innovation: Combining talk-centric and vote-centric innovation in Participatory Budgeting-new style

Generally speaking, all democratic innovations have strengths and weaknesses in realizing democratic values (Smith, 2009; Michels, 2011; Hendriks, 2021). The quality of dialogue (deliberation) is one of the strong elements of deliberative-democratic designs. However, they tend to involve a relatively small portion of citizens (inclusion) – the participating mini-public – and often have difficulty making changes on a larger scale or higher level (impact). Plebiscitary democratic designs, at the other end of the spectrum, usually involve a larger group of citizens, can be highly consequential on the larger scale and higher level of decision making, but are less able to organize high quality dialogue. With this in mind, an important design challenge is to develop institutional designs that combine the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of competing formats. In this paper, we are interested in such ‘hybrid democratic innovations’ which combine concentrated deliberation with large-scale voting. We focus on a field of hybridization that has not been investigated extensively yet: the rise of Participatory Budgeting-new style, which is characterized by an increased emphasis on larger-scale voting – often using the opportunities of broadband internet and smart devices that became widely available in the 2010s –, combined with continued attention to deliberative participation as an ideal emphasized in earlier incarnations of Participatory Budgeting (Wampler et al., 2021; Laruelle, 2021). In contrast to deliberative referendums, combinations of citizens’ assemblies and direct voting (Gastil & Richards, 2013; Farrell et al, 2020; Hendriks & Wagenaar, 2023), Participatory Budgeting-new style (PB-ns) is an emerging type of HDI not yet covered in the extant literature. In this paper, we start with a discussion of the literature on different forms of hybrid democratic innovation, and provide a general definition and typology of hybrid democratic innovations (HDI’s). Based on the literature, we then argue how hybrid democratic innovations might combine the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of deliberative and plebiscitary designs. We focus on three key democratic values, distinguishing between input (inclusion), throughput (process or deliberation), and outcome (impact) values. After a brief history of Participatory Budgeting and a description of new developments geared to involving the broader (‘maxi’) public, we investigate an exemplary case – Antwerp’s Citizens’ Budget, which exhibits features of deliberative democracy laterally combined with features of plebiscitary democracy in one innovation – to assess this type of innovation in terms of key democratic values. We conclude with the implications of our research for the further debate on hybrid democratic innovations and an agenda for future research.